What a strange phenomenon. There are two very different instances I've run upon that have impressed me: Stephen King and Angela Basset.

I recently read Stephen King's book "On Writing". It's a helpful, funny & inspiring non-fiction guide. It's full of anecdotes. One of his stories is a confession to being shitfaced much of the time he was writing. He was an alcoholic with a piggish appetite for cocaine. He was known to dispatch a case of beer a night and go to the recycling bin the next day with tallboy cans rattling in the bag.

During his lost months, he wrote "Cujo". He doesn't remember writing the book. Check this out:

"At the end of my adventures I was drinking a case of sixteen-ounce tallboys a night, and there's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all. I don't say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of sorrow and loss. I like that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page."

- from "On Writing" by Stephen King

He's been clean for years now, but no one will ever know where that book came from.

I watched "Waiting to Exhale" a while back. An Angela Basset scene shows her being brutally dumped by her husband. Next scene, she finds herself alone in the house for the first time. She goes through his things in a rage, muttering to herself as she tears his clothes of the hangers, puts them in a wagon and hauls them to his shiny new car.

She shakes gasoline over all of it, lights the car on fire & her own cigarette, and walks away. You see her in her bathrobe, her hair wild & beautiful. She does this unforgettable thing with her hand, flicking it up in the air as though to say, "It's done".

An interview with Angela Basset reveals that she was so possessed by the rage of her character, she blacked out. She doesn't remember a second of it, this stunning scene.

I wonder how Stephen King and Angela Basset feel when they look at their very successful work and don't remember how it came about.

I'm describing. You have one gifted madman with a weakness that feeds his fodder for horror stories. You have another with a studied actress who may have all the discipline in the world- but, touching on her own experience, is able to believe she's the character.

You have a good point with the brilliance and madness, and I agree with it.

I think I'll stick to beer and just drink after I'm done writing. Drugs never did anything for me artistically speaking. Now insanity on the other hand did give me several good poems. But it's too painful a state for me to be in now. I'm serious, I've got the meds to prove it. Violence will always be a no go.

The thing about that quote from Thompson is that he was probably being for real.

and he percieved that he was being fearless. He sounded fearless. He sounded jaded, and he sounded as though he didn't give a damn about what the rest of the world thought. Let's chip in and send his editor a fruit basket, eh?

i did enjoy his other stuff while finding the stuff he'd done while coming off 'the dope' some of his best if while more frantic; likely something speaking to the stripping of one's emotional tether, sleep deprivation & so forth (not that there's anything wrong with that, though a friend of ours brought us new pillows the other day so that i'm trending rather conversely these recent nights)...he does have those comfy old bathrobes & slippers that he dons routinely...

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